WE'RE ALMOST THERE!

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It’s a wrap! We finally finished shooting our animations. In the stop motion studio we built cardbox DVD rooms, moved five hundred rice corns millimeter by millimeter, created volcanic eruptions with modeling clay, we compressed and stretched our own paper figures. Rough cut done, final version about to be done, color grading and sound design in the near future.

IMPRESSIONS FROM OUR STOP MOTION FILM SET

Visualizing Korean poop proverbs through Cutout Animation. Thank you Marie, for setting light and camera and restructuring our color concept. Thank you Anke, for your Korea skyline pictures that peppered our collage of Korean street life. Thank you Mireia, for putting our ideas into lovely cartoon drawings of a girl with a hair bun that transforms into poop. A hair bun is called "poop hair" (똥모리) in Korean language - because the hair is rolled up just like a little turd.

Learn more about our Korea Film HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND here.

The Sound of Peter Ehwald & Ensemble ~su

Starting the work day with an energy kick - Our musicians Peter Ehwald and Ensemble ~su are showing us their studio recordings for our Korea Film Project HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND. We are thrilled to connect the giggling jumps and smooth dances of their Korean Drums and Jazz Saxophon with our animated Korean socks, poop and shrinking faces.

E-meet Peter Ehwald and Ensemble ~su here: Ensemble ~su | Peter EhwaldLearn more about our Korea Film HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND here.

PREPARING FACIAL MASSAGE SHOOTING

Our Korean filmmaker friend Mihye will follow a Korean facial massage in Seoul with the camera for us. In Korea, you can have painful massages to make your face smaller. Learn more about this in our episode THE SMALL FACE OBSESSION, coming 2016.

Learn more about our Korea Film HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND here

A huge double big Dankeschön to Korea Stiftung for screening our crowdfunding teaser and collecting donations for our film at their cinema event this summer in Hamburg!

The Korea Stiftung, a charitable foundation for cultural exchange between Korea and Germany, screened Seung Hyun Chong's short film GET UP and Su Jin Song's documentary TWO HEARTBEATS at Lichtmesskino in Hamburg. Both films show us German-Koreans in Germany dealing with their two cultural backgrounds.

We were very happy about the invitation by the Korea Stiftung to show our crowdfunding teaser of HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND and to share our thoughts on bicultural identities with the other German-Korean filmmakers and the audience.

We even found two surprising connections between Su Jin's and our documentary: One of her protagonists is one of our wonderful musicians, Bo-Sung, telling her story how she discovered Korean traditional music for herself. Another one of her protagonists, Stefan, was a big help for our crowdfunding campaign as he was our super hero who brought the 2nd and 3rd Edition of Funny Korean Socks from Seoul to Berlin.

The Korea Stiftung didn't only give us the opportunity to introduce HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND to a new audience but also collected money to support us. Thanks to the Korea Stiftung's great help and their amazing audience in Hamburg we gained another 450 Euros which will pay for animations of our 4th part 'Korea's Sleep To Go.'

Another enrichment of the evening: Matthias, one our supporters in Hamburg, widened our view on crowdfunding. He told us how he supported Seung Hyun's crowdfunding campaign for GET UP: Matthias wanted to quit smoking back then and promised his friends that every 5 Euros that they would give to Seung Hyun's film, would oblige Matthias to non-smoking for a whole day. Matthias' friends bought 24 non-smoking days. May this story inspire us – if you would like to make your friends support your favorite crowdfunding project, link their support to one of your personal life goals.

Greetins from our editing rooms in Berlin (Katti) and Nicaragua (Finnja) where we are putting together our insights on poop, small faces and DVD Bangs.

Learn more about our Korea Project HOW ABOUT HAVING A FASCINATION OF MIND here: https://www.startnext.com/korea-fascination

Last Monday, we were invited to visit the class 'Introduction to Narrative' at Uni Bielefeld in order to give a speech on our storytelling analysis of the German and British soccer commentaries. We were happy to show video clips from the legendary soccer games and to introduce our analytical comparative method.

We are showered with sunshine! Stunned, speechless, overflowing with gratitude! You're our hearts, you're our souls! You rocketed us to nearly 11.000 Euros! That is so much more than we could hope for! Every single one of you made our dream come true.Let's have a look at our rollercoaster ride we all took together! We will never forget those 30 days of spring with you.We can't wait to send you your socks, proverbs, oracles, to have foto shootings with cute poop and you, to give you Korean cooking courses, to give writing coachings and life coachings to you, to take to our stop motion shooting, to send you DVDs, mind maps and props.Thank you for sending us sunshine into the editing room which we now can enter!

Last year, I went to Korea together with my filmpartner Finnja Willner to investigate some of the most lovely weird phenomena of South-Korean everyday life culture from the Korean beauty obsession with SMALL FACES to an omnipresence of POOP in modern Korean society.

This project means a lot to me as it took me deeper into my mom's home country Korea which I'd love to call my second home.

If you spread the word and support our project you make me very very happy! Thank you!

Following our article in 11FREUNDE, the world's fastest growing media agency network Maxus invited me to deliver a lecture on storytelling to their German employees during their strategy meeting in Dublin last month. Their innovative spirit as well as their welcoming atmosphere impressed me a lot.

Storytelling is everywhere: in Narrative Therapy, in soccer commentaries, in our nightmares ... Why is that? Why are we human beings wired to tell stories? During my lecture, the Kuleshov effect, Thor - the God of thunder, and near-death studies led us to fascinating answers about the human brain's modus operandi to invent connections and make sense of the world.

It also was a lot of fun to run interactive exercises with Maxus' employees, using my creative tools for metaphorical storytelling and out of the box problem solving. After my lecture, I was very happy to watch the attendees' entertaining performances during their storytelling competition when I was part of the jury. In a very inspiring out-of-comfort-zone manner they performed and acted out stories from Dublin about broken hearts, bridges that make you smile, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde.

Germany thrashed Brazil 7:1 and BBC soccer commentaries teach us storytelling tools. We compared and analyzed the German and the British soccer commentary on the mindblowing game in Belo Horizonte. Why do the Brits thrill us a thousand times more than German Béla Réthy here? What can storytellers and filmmakers learn from the British commentary?

Thanks to the ‘Spiegel’ columnist Georg Diez, the e-book publisher 60pages launched our analysis. Georg Diez co-founded 60pages to publish longform journalism in a digital way (in German and English). You can read 60pages while waiting for your laundry or on a train ride from Hamburg to Berlin or between a business meeting and a candle light dinner. 60pages goes deeper than daily journalism and gives you unsuspected insights by linking topics that are usually not linked: like soccer and cinematic storytelling. www.60pages.com

Buy our e-book to find out how „oceans of space“ create suspense and how BBC commentators develop characters that stir us with tension. Read how the BBC commentators create the story of a character test, where Brazil have to climb mountains and redefine their goals. Find out how the Brits weave a web of meaning by using metaphors and identifying real dramatic conflicts. Find out how the British soccer commentary shows us universal mechanisms of the human condition by creating deep thematic conflicts.

In happy exhaustion: After one month we finished shooting our documentary project How About Having a Fascination of Mind about funnily weird things of Korean every day life culture. We interviewed artists, businessmen, musicians, angry old ladies, teachers, physiotherapists and young moms. We asked them about Korean cutification, about massages that can make your face smaller, about Korean powernapping culture, about poop that gets you lucky and many more phenomena.

We wacked some moles. We inspired children to wack some moles. We divided our sleep into little portions instead of taking it as a an 8-hours-one-piece. We ate poop bread. We got up at 5 in the morning. We learned about the power of repitition in Korean TV storytelling. Three women told us their personal poop story. We learned about the 'dark space' of Korean culture where conservatives are behaving progressive and progressive people are behaving conservative. We slept with our mouths wide open. We found out that arrogant rabbits can make your life better. We found out that a crying animated dog can calm you down. We found out that the conception of space might be an explanation for weird phenomena of Korean society, even for the small face obsession.

In 2015, you will watch all this in our documentary How About Having a Fascination of Mind - formerly known as 'Korea is a Rubic's Cube' (working title).

Tomorrow at your newsstand: BBC's soccer commentary thrills us a thousand times more than the dry boring German commentary. Why is that? When Germany thrashed Brazil 7:1, we compared the British and the German TV commentaries. What can the Brits teach us about storytelling here? 11 FREUNDE, one of Germany's most famous soccer magazines, now published our short version of our analysis (only in German, sorry).